I wanted to send an email to Jon after having watched the webcast of his aggregators session at BloggerCon but unfortunately can’t find it.
In the presentation Jon said that RSS was one possible step towards solving the problems in email, something that was perhaps worth $1Bn.
I am personally interested in being the proud owner of a billion dollars, so was paying attention.
Since the question I wanted to ask via email was on the very topic of how RSS really offers something different than email then if Jon reads this through his subscription to this weblog, then perhaps this will illustrate the point.
The problem is this: the email channel is too noisy for people like newsletter publishers to use.
Assuming for a moment that RSS readers are commonplace in email clients. For pure opt-in Newsletters then RSS works, (Jon is subscribed to this weblog, so he has opted in to read this – and even if he doesn’t really read my weblog, perhaps the mention of his name in the headline will help and because it is RSS the mention of Viagra and huge amounts of cash won’t matter). For pure opt-in, email works much like RSS – someone could whitelist my email address in much the same way that they may subscribe to my weblog. Not everyone uses whitelist filters, but even less people have RSS readers. The problem can be solved technically by both, but RSS would actually need more people to start using new software.
A more interesting problem is unsolicited information. This need not all be pernicious – I would hope this email to Jon wouldn’t be considered as such, and I would assume that suggested RSS feeds for weblogs based upon a personal profile would also be OK. But if the channel is open for suggested feeds then how does this avoid the spam problem.
In short, I am missing something, sorry two things, I forgot the $1Billion.